“... this piece of oral history has been turned by skilful editing into an immensely readable memoir. Walter Gregory’s tale is in many ways archetypal. ‘Setting off for Spain ... I was like a holidaymaker going abroad for the first time.’ He had moved through trade-union activism inexorably leftward via the Hunger Marches into the Communist Party ...”

“... work on electrical brain activity (EEG), initiated by Adrian and Matthews and developed by Grey Walter, forced psychologists’ attention away from the easily observed muscles towards the brain and nervous system, where it now lies firmly, with a growing interest in subtle chemical changes which are less easy to record. For the entire Behaviourist school ...”

Michael Dobson, 13 November 1997

“... includes, along with mock-eulogies and mock-epitaphs on both Hoskyns and Coryate, the epic Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes from No Place, the more comprehensibly satirical Mercurius Nonsensicus and the virtually endless The Essence of Nonsence upon Sence (included here with only the comparatively lucid interpolated elegy on a diseased horse omitted), and it ...”

E.S. Turner, 25 June 1987

“... the Andaman Islands, the penal settlement run by the Raj off the coast of Burma, where his father, Walter Raleigh Trevelyan, was an Army captain. There may have been chain-gangs clanking away on the roads, and predatory savages on the neighbouring isles, but gracious living was not excluded: Government House had a ballroom the floor of which was polished by ...”

“... Edinburgh and the grey North Sea than the colourful panoply of the Mediterranean ... ’ Saint Gregory ‘forbiddis ws to translate word efter word,’ said Douglas. Who were these ‘many other translators of his day’? Douglas’s vernacular translation was pioneering, his language courtly and literary, and if he expanded and elucidated Virgil, his ...”

“... On a winter’s evening in 1803, James Hogg turned up for dinner at the home of Walter Scott. The man his host liked to call ‘the honest grunter’ was shown into the drawing-room, where a pregnant Mrs Scott was resting on a sofa. Unsure of the protocol in these toney surroundings, and deciding to take his cue from the hostess, Hogg flopped onto an adjoining sofa, smirching the chintz with his dung-spattered boots ...”

Terry Eagleton: Edna O’Brien, 21 October 2015

“... technology and the service industries. Rural drama has given way to Riverdance, and Lady Gregory to Martin McDonagh. The passage from the premodern to the postmodern, partly eclipsing modernity proper, was smoothed by the fact that Ireland had no industrial infrastructure to dismantle. You can go postindustrial all the more easily if you never had ...”

Stephen Alford: Thomas Cromwell, 8 November 2018

“... as he was able. Born around 1485, he was a teenager at the turn of the new century. His father, Walter Cromwell alias Smith, was a more or less successful businessman whose brushes with manorial justice were practically routine. His mother’s name may have been Katherine, and her origins can be traced with some close detective work to the Meverell family ...”

Terry Eagleton, 4 September 1997

“... of our incurable straightness. Utopias from the 18th and early 19th-centuries, of the kind which Gregory Claeys has assembled in this handsome set of volumes, are outlandish precisely because of their ordinariness. What seems ‘utopian’, in the sense of extravagantly unreal, about them is precisely their incapacity to imagine a world significantly ...”

Colin Burrow: Wolf Hall, 30 April 2009

“... appreciates the importance of this particular little woman. He even prompts his disappointing son Gregory to wonder what would happen if the king and Anne Boleyn died, and to recognise that Mary might one day be queen. Cromwell’s sensitivity here is a beautifully worked falsehood. His only surviving letter to Mary is extremely mutilated, but its legible ...”

Andrew O’Hagan: The Good Traitor, 24 September 2014

“... came to him with devastating material, and Greenwald checked it out and wrote the stories. David Gregory, the ‘journalist’ who presents Meet the Press, conducted an interview with Greenwald that proved to be a new low, even in the era of supine, on-message political journalism. ‘To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current ...”

“... earlier, more self-confident polyglottist, Ezra Pound. Perloff finds a precursor for all this in Walter Benjamin, who during the 1930s collected thousands of quotations (mostly in French) about Paris, its glass and iron shopping arcades, its street fights, its shopgirls, its effects on Baudelaire and Marx. Adding comments (in German), Benjamin sorted the ...”

“... minister or any member of his cabinet condemn the violence.Two months earlier, on 12 December, Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch and the author of The Ten Stages of Genocide, had addressed a group of Congressional and US government officials in Washington. According to him, India was then at the eighth stage. Things have only got worse. The ...”

Ian Jack: The Highland Clearances, 7 March 2019

“... book of all time. Prebble, born in England and raised in Canada, did for the clearances what Walter Lord did for the Titanic in A Night to Remember, and in the same way. Through vivid narrative history, told like a novel, he revived public interest in a historic disaster: the story of how, to quote from its opening sentence, ‘the Highlanders were ...”

Sukhdev Sandhu: Memories of Michael X, 4 February 1999

“... black businesses were owned by West Indians. In 1952, however, when Congress passed the McCarran Walter Act restricting migration, prospective migrants to the US were obliged to reconsider. The United Kingdom, where some of their kin had already settled, was an obvious choice. Officially, 492 West Indians, the majority of them Jamaican men with an average ...”